You know, when most people tell you that their mother is a Nazi, they are speaking metaphorically.

Not me.

My mother really was a Nazi. (This fact has caused me various kinds of problems for my entire life, btw.) And also, as you might imagine, some of the family memorabilia is a little . . . unusual. (For this continent, anyway.) Today, as I was sorting through the books in my room, I ran across two photo albums - that I'd misplaced several years ago and was really happy to find again - that reminded me just how unusual: They're full of photos taken in Austria and Germany between 1930, about (when my mother was six) until 1944, when she was twenty. They run the gamut from snapshots of her and her friends, to school pictures, to what look like propaganda shots, to things I don't know how to categorize. To give you a flavor for range, here's a school photo, taken on a school field trip. (Click on the pix to see bigger images.)



The caption reads, "1938 am Obersalzburg beim Fuhrer!" (My mother's in that photo, really. I didn't feel like messing with the scans so I could zoom in on her; you're my friends, so I know you trust me on this point.) But maternal visibility aside, how many of you out there have one of those in the family album?

And how about this?:





Yup. That's her. (And for practically my entire life, she told me she got kicked out of the Hitler Youth for not taking it seriously.)

There are others, too, that raise more political questions than they answer . . . I think I have to look to German literature to find those questions addressed, however. And besides just the obvious politics, there are plenty of pictures of my mother and the many, many men with whom she surrounded herself, often in idyllic surroundings (mountain lodges covered in snow, for instance).

I'm going to mull over those pictures, and see what to make of them . . . I'm a bit leery of scanning them and making them freely available because I want to use them somehow if I can (more as that juggernaut gathers momentum). (Some of you may have noticed that I recently got a Flickr account - so I may post additional images under password-protection. Stay tuned.)